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Scientists at Dalhousie Universityhave discovered a new branch on the ‘Tree of Life’ that no one knew existed. Their findings were published today in the journal Nature and will be critical to better understanding the evolutionary history of life on earth. “This discovery literally redraws our branch of the ‘Tree of Life’ at one of its deepest points,” explains Alastair Simpson, the lead author of the study and biology professor at Dalhousie. “It opens a new door to understanding the evolution of complex cells—and their ancient origins—back well before animals and plants emerged on Earth.”

Neandertals are shaking off their notoriety for being head bangers. Our nearby transformative cousins experienced a lot of head wounds, yet no more so than late Stone Age people, an investigation proposes. Rates of cracks and other bone harm in a huge example of Neandertal and old Homo sapiens skulls generally coordinate rates recently revealed for human foragers and agriculturists who have lived inside the previous 10,000 years, closes a group driven by paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati of the University of Tübingen in Germany.

When do you need a broadsword, and when would you be better off with a dagger? That’s the question that faced artiodactyls, the group of mammals that includes deer, antelope, goats, giraffes, pigs, buffalo and cows, during their evolution. Many male artiodactyls fight over females using weaponized body parts such as horns and antlers. But pigs and several groups of deerlike animals have tusks instead, and a few species have both. Water deer have tusks so pronounced they are nicknamed “vampire deer.”

Is it time to put the stereotype of the violent and brutish Neanderthal to rest? New research paints a different picture of the ancient hominin — one that looks similar to Homo sapiens. Researchers previously thought that Neanderthal lives were far more nasty, brutish and short than ancient H. sapiens, based mainly on studies looking at levels of injury among both groups. Now, however, in a much more comprehensive look, a team of University of Tübingen (UIT) researchers found that both Neanderthals and H. sapiens living in the Ice Age sustained similar levels of head trauma.

How did life begin? Two common answers come to mind. One is that, at some point, a deity decided to suspend the laws of physics and will a slew of slimy creatures into being. A second is that a one-in-a-trillion collision of just the right atoms billions of years ago happened to produce a molecular blob with the unprecedented capacity to reproduce itself.

For a group of paleontologists, a tour of the Creation Museum seemed like a great tongue-in-cheek way to cap off a serious conference. But while there were a few laughs and some clowning for the camera, most left more offended than amused by the frightening way in which evolution -- and their life's work -- was attacked.

The oldest elephants wandering Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park bear the indelible markings of the civil war that gripped the country for 15 years: Many are tuskless. They’re the lone survivors of a conflict that killed about 90 percent of these beleaguered animals, slaughtered for ivory to finance weapons and for meat to feed the fighters.

With his new book, The Creative Spark, Agustín Fuentes, a primatologist and anthropologist currently at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, boldly puts forth the idea that what makes humans special is creativity. The ability of humans to switch back and forth between considering what is, and dreaming of what might be, and to then put these thoughts into actions (often collaboratively), has brought us a very long way from our primate origins to the tool-wielding, world-shaping force of nature of today.

Considered by many to be the least fish-like of fishes, swamp eels are a real oddity and rarely documented. Now Museum scientists have described an entirely new species. The fish was discovered not in water but in damp soil. Museum researcher Dr Rachunliu G Kamei uncovered it while searching the rainforest for an entirely different group of animal, the legless amphibians called caecilians.

David Klinghoffer, a senior fellow at the Intelligent Design-promoting Discovery Institute, just announced its winner for the Censor of the Year award, given to the media outlet or publisher that refuses to acknowledge the other side of a story. This year’s winner? Wikipedia. Because apparently the article about Intelligent Design doesn’t treat the concept on par with evolution.

If you hold your breath and plunge your face into a tub of water, your body automatically triggers what's called the diving response. Your heart rate slows, your blood vessels constrict, and your spleen contracts, all reactions that help you save energy when you're low on oxygen. Most people can hold their breath underwater for a few seconds, some for a few minutes. But a group of people called the Bajau takes free diving to the extreme, staying underwater for as long as 13 minutes at depths of around 200 feet.

Two nearby supernovae that exploded about 2.5 and eight million years ago could have resulted in a staggered depletion of Earth's ozone layer, leading to a variety of repercussions for life on Earth. By Julia Demarines.

Humans are evolving more quickly than at any time in history, researchers say. In the past 5,000 years, humans have evolved up to 100 times more quickly than any time since the split with the ancestors of modern chimpanzees 6m years ago, a team from the University of Wisconsin found. The study also suggests that human races in different parts of the world are becoming more genetically distinct, although this is likely to reverse in future as populations become more mixed.

In an article just appeared in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Lancet and colleagues report an extensive literature survey, showing that lipids can exert enzyme-like catalysis, similar to ribozymes.

It may have been a lazy, 'why bother?' attitude that led to the downfall of an early species of human, according to new research. Findings from the Australian National University after an archaeological excavation in Saudi Arabia found Homo erectus tended to do the bare minimum to get by, while other species of human were inclined to put in the effort. They used "least-effort strategies" for tool making and collection of resources, as opposed to Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, who would climb mountains and haul materials over dozens of kilometres to ensure they had quality goods, the research showed.

The oldest flying squirrel fossil ever found has unearthed new insight on the origin and evolution of these airborne animals. Writing in the open-access journal eLife, researchers from the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont (ICP) in Barcelona, Spain, described the 11.6-million-year-old fossil, which was discovered in Can Mata landfill, approximately 40 kilometers outside the city.

Religion and science have long had disagreements &amp;mdash; from Galileo, who was tried for teaching that the Earth was not the center of the universe, to battles over teaching evolution in public schools. But when it comes to greed, religion and science share this view: It is not good for you.

Two Michigan State University evolutionary biologists offer new evidence that evolution doesn’t favor the selfish, disproving a theory popularized in 2012. “We found evolution will punish you if you’re selfish and mean,” said lead author Christoph Adami, MSU professor of microbiology and molecular genetics. “For a short time and against a specific set of opponents, some selfish organisms may come out ahead. But selfishness isn’t evolutionarily sustainable.”

This is unbelievable, but the fruit fly G tridens has somehow evolved to have what looks like pictures of ants on its wings. Seriously, its transparent wings have an ant design on them complete with "six legs, two antennae, a head, thorax and tapered abdomen." It's nature's evolutionary art painted on a fly's wings.

Although it has long been debated whether the proto-bird Archaeopteryx was able to actually fly or merely evolving toward that ability, to date nobody had yet seriously suggested that it could have been instead in the midst of losing its ability to fly. But that is precisely what Michael Habib, a biologist at the University of Southern California proposed last week to a packed hall at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Los Angeles.

Homo sapiens evolved about 200-150,000 years ago in Africa, but our story as a species stretches back much further than that with early human ancestors. And the evolution of Homo sapiens is itself a tangled tale, full of unanswered questions and gothic family melodrama. Here are a few facts you may not know about the human evolutionary story.

Fragments of humans' ancient relatives are scattered across the globe. Sometimes a tooth or a few bones are all we have to tell us about an entire species closely related to humans that lived thousands or millions of years ago.